The present invention relates to computer search queries. More particularly, the present invention relates to methods and apparatus for determining the relative value of the various terms in a search query including two or more words, phrases, numbers and symbols submitted to a World Wide Web search engine.
A great many people use Internet search engines everyday to find information located on an increasingly large number of web sites with a great diversity of both commercial and noncommercial content spread across several billion pages of varying length. A basic challenge for any site among the Web's multitude is visibility, making its existence known to as many Web users as possible. This is particularly important to commercial sites, and as with other media, advertising is the central means of making potential customers aware of their business, their wares and their location.
The Web remains the newest media form. Advertising on the Web is an extremely competitive business, where the means of delivery of advertisements is still evolving. The evolution is guided in part by technological countermeasures such as pop-up blockers to eliminate ads or site links that distract and often irritate the user by preempting display screen ‘real estate’. And in part, it is guided by trying to properly target the ads to potential users. Banner ads, which are dropped into a space reserved on the web page, are often simply ‘generic ads’ which usually provide links to commercial sites but often target customers no better than highway billboards.
Line ads, which are one or more—usually brief—sentences placed in a space reserved for them on the web page provide links to commercial sites, but are often poorly targeted as well—especially where the search term is comprised of more than a single word. Poor targeting by the search engine results when it is unable to know which of two or more words should be considered the most significant search term, or whether some contiguous words are to be considered a single term. Poor targeting of ads means a diminished effectiveness of the ads which has a negative impact on the interest in buying such ads and in the price of the ads. With existing methods it has been possible to predict the significant term in a multi-term query only about 30% of the time. An example of the present result of this problem is seen in FIGS. 3, 4 and 5. In FIG. 3 the search term was the single word, ‘Honda’ designated 302. The page has many ads in the right hand column, designated 304. Similarly, in FIG. 4, the search term is the single word ‘test’, designated 402, and there are many ads in the right hand column, designated 404. But in FIG. 5, where the search term is ‘Honda test’, designated 502, there are no ads whatever in the right hand column, designated 504.
A better means of understanding the relative value of two or more terms in a query would better focus advertising opportunities and increase revenue for both search engine companies and for their advertising clients. Two-word queries, for example, present nearly 30% of all American search queries, yet there has been no method for predicting the probability of the comparative relevance of either word to the search, even though knowing the comparative importance of either word to the intent of the searcher would clearly be valuable both for the relevance of search results as well as for advertising opportunities.